Message Board Archives

In the remorseless world of elite sport, chasing your dreams may as well be a fool's game. Male athletes who strive for success in mainstream sport, even in developed countries, speak of the immense sacrifice needed to reach their potential, and even that is rarely enough to secure themselves a career in the sport they love.

Imagine then the guts needed to pursue your sporting ambitions in a country where the absence of a Y chromosome, and nothing more, revokes your right to succeed before you've even started. In a nation where gender equality is quite literally sacrilegious, veteran of the Iran women's cricket team Roya Kaheni is playing her part to spread the game and, through it, assist women's rights in the midst of a revolution.

Iran first encountered cricket in the 1920s, and the game is arguably one of the few positive legacies of the international exploits of the oil industry. British workers, from the state-backed Anglo-Persian Oil Company, brought the game with them as they were sent to extract the Iranian oil needed to keep the UK moving. The seeds of cricketing success were sewn at this point, but as Iran began to reject this form of British occupation after World War II, cricket was slowly forgotten.